What a week! After the pathetic performance against Wolves, on Wednesday the club announced a club-record net loss of £14,406,061 for the financial year.

The club's total debt is now £41 million, of which £35 million is owed to Steve Lansdown. The club's wage bill is £18.6 million and makes you realise the cost of playing Championship football and also makes you realise how grateful we should all be as City fans to Lansdown.

The following day the club held their annual supporters meeting and chairman Keith Dawe said he wanted to prepare fans for "hard" and "tough" times ahead, describing the last 12 months as challenging. The manager attended the meeting and was asked some tough questions around team selection and formation.

I'm sure it was purely coincidental and the manager apparently gave somewhat of a wry smile when he announced the team to the press for the game against Sheffield Wednesday. Derek McIness confirmed that the side would play 4-4-2, something that a great many of us felt we should have been doing for weeks.

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While surprised at the formation, not too many City fans would have been surprised at the ease to which Miguel Llera gave his side the lead after just three minutes. Even with the recalled Stephen McManus back at the heart of the City defence, it was the same old story as Llera escaped his marker and was left completely unmarked.

The defence is a major concern and I'm hopeful that Greg Cunningham will return to fitness soon. If he can show his early season form, this should see an improvement. Joe Edwards has been earning some really positive reviews on loan at Yeovil and I would like to see Joe given a chance over Richard Foster at right-back.

I questioned the players attitude last week and give credit where credit is due. They were positive after the Wednesday opener and Sam Baldock put his recent frustrations behind him when equalising from the spot. The side kept pushing forward but couldn't get the breakthrough. Some sloppy defending allowed Wednesday to take the lead again, but the players showed real character and were quickly level. The thought must have crossed the manager's mind to shut up shop and try and hold on for the point.

Now in the past, I would have questioned why Albert Adomah would be stood over a free-kick, but in the home game against Burnley, Albert struck the bar with a great strike.

Thankfully, the kick against Wednesday was just about perfect and the ball flew past Chris Kirkland and sealed a vital three points.

Albert was delighted and a lot of the players went over to the bench to celebrate. Perhaps showing that the manager still has the dressing room.

Hopefully, this is not a false dawn, like the Middlesborough game, and the side can kick on.

Matt/
The wage bill WAS NEVER £18.6m.That was made up of:
Pay offs:Millen, Wigley, Walsh, Naylor, Johnson, Hunt etc
Compensation:Doherty & McInness plus other backroom arrivals such as our Physio from Coventry.
Those costs were dumped in "wages" in the accounts and I would have included them as "exceptional items."
That needs to be understood and it IS way below that now from speaking to JL & Del..
In terms of defenders, if you include Skuse & Bryan as midfield players I would only keep Cunningham at the end of the season, that's how bad it is.
We have three RB's Edwards,Foster & Mark Wilson-Skuse is also good their but we need him in midfield at the moment although two midfield signings and we could afford to move him there.

foster, along with fontaine, seems to be one of the ''undroppables''. why? probably because mcinnes signed him, in the same way he made fontaine captain.
once cunningham is fit where does that leave fontaine. it would mean either mcmanus or bates - both mcinnes loan signings - get dropped. if foster gets injured then who plays right back? skuse? or would it be time to recall edwards back from yeovil?
it was an excellent result and credit is due to the players. interesting too that there was no davies in the party - presumably down to injury?
i think there may be a few exits out of AG next month, of previous signings and some short term contracted players. at least mcinnes has pretty much sorted the 'wheat' from the 'chaff'